When they reached the Sunset Beach pier, Shea looked at her. “Wanna turn back?”
Ivy, panting, agreed that was the best idea. As they made their way back where they came from, Ivy remembered the strange conversation she’d overheard Margot having. “Hey, do you know if Mom’s seeing someone?”
Shea laughed. “Someone as in, like, a man?”
“Yes, that was the general idea.”
“Uh, no.”
“You’ve never seen her talking to a man? Not at church or at a store or anywhere? Has she met anyone new in all the wedding plans?”
“Ivy, no. Mom talks to Dad about money for my wedding, which is never pleasant. And sometimes she talks to Lester at the bakery. And, of course, occasionally Owen and Michael when they come over.” Shea thought about it for a moment. “No. There’s no one else.”
“Then Mom has a secret admirer.”
“What?” Shea shrieked so loud that a hovering seagull darted away, scared.
“I heard her on the phone this morning talking to someone. She was giggling like a lovesick teenager. And then she used—oh, this is gross to even say—but she used this kind of, I don’t know, sexy voice.”
As if it was possible, Shea started walking faster. “I don’t think so. Maybe you misunderstood. Maybe she was just being friendly. What you’re saying just doesn’t even sound like our mother. Some things have changed since you’ve been gone, but trust me, Margot is still Margot. She doesn’t like to get too excited. She never musses her hair. She is always proper. And she’s not capable of flirting.” Shea’s voice got quieter. “And besides, she’s done with men. You remember.”
They both remembered that weird fall they’d come back to Sunset, missing a week of school before they were told they were going to live there “for now” and go to high school there, away from all their friends and activities and the comforts of home. Shea and Ivy had loved the beach house for vacations but never desired to live there full-time. But for that year, while their parents decided to divorce and fought over the details, that’s exactly what they did. The two girls lived on the fairly deserted island with their mother, who stayed in bed listening to Carly Simon a lot. The fact that Michael and Owen came down often to fish in the off-season was the only thing that made that year bearable. But even then, things started to change with her and Michael. Ivy had watched her parents split up, and something inside of her had split too, making her half of the whole she had once been. Sometimes she felt like the rest of her life had been a search for the half that had gone missing.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears.”
“Leave it to Margot to create some drama just in time for my wedding,” Shea said with an emphatic sigh.
“Just keep your ears open and your eyes peeled. She’s up to something.”
Shea shook her head. “As if I don’t have enough to think about without trying to figure out who my mother’s secret lover is.”
Ivy started to sing an old song, “This Guy’s in Love with You.” But instead she changed the words. “Our mom’s in love. Our mom’s in love with who?” Shea pushed her playfully, started to giggle, and then broke into a full-on run. Ivy did her best to chase her sister but found that Shea was now hard to catch.
After they returned home, the two of them parked themselves at the kitchen table and began assembling the tags to go out. It took them the rest of the afternoon and into the night, but they stamped, ribboned, and addressed the tags to all of the guests, creating a stack of envelopes ready to go out in the morning’s mail.
“I’m still not sure it’s right to let you help me with this,” Ivy said. “Mom put me in charge of the wishing tree. You’ve got a lot of other things you could be doing.”
Shea elbowed her. “Let me decide that. It’s okay to need help, Ivy.”
Margot came in often, checking on their progress and making little digs about how Shea had refused to help her with the same project when she’d mentioned it. The first time they saw her, they both had to stifle their laughter. “What are you two up to?” Margot asked.
“Oh, we’re not up to anything, Mother,” Shea said. “What are you up to?”
“Why, nothing at all. I just came in here to get a Diet Coke.”
“Why are you drinking a diet drink, Mother?” Shea kept on. “Need to watch your girlish figure?”
“Shealee Montgomery Copeland, sometimes I don’t know what goes on inside of that head of yours.” Margot looked at Ivy. “It’s a good thing you’re here to keep her in line or she just might not live long enough to see that altar.”
Ivy, meanwhile, was struggling not to crack up laughing. “Yeah. Good thing I’m here,” she managed with a straight face.
Margot wiggled her fingers with her free hand. The other gripped her Diet Coke in a silver can. “See you girls later.”
Once Margot was out of earshot, Shea said, “Just run along back there and call your mysterious beau,” which was enough to set Ivy off into the fit of giggles she’d been holding back since Margot had entered the room. She’d forgotten how nice it was to do life with a sister, someone who knew the whole you, and not just the part that you chose to show the people who came into your adult life. She thought of her choice to forsake all of this and wondered yet again what she’d been thinking five years ago.
After they called it a night, Ivy shut her bedroom door and got out her laptop, opening to Twitter and entering Elliott’s handle. This whole thing was like a train wreck—she didn’t want to look but she couldn’t turn away either. This man was talking to her in a public forum. She wasn’t ready to contact him—which is what would be required to ask him to stop—but she couldn’t ignore it altogether. Quite simply, the curiosity was killing her.
She gazed down at the Twitter account. Apparently, other people were drawn to it too. His following was growing rapidly. One tweet by some guy she’d never heard of said, “@ElliottIdiot Way to show the ladies that men are capable of apologizing.” He’d included a link to a song by Timbaland called “Apologize,” which made Ivy laugh in spite of herself.
She scrolled down to the last one she’d read, then started reading again. He was tweeting several times a day, it looked like, random thoughts about the two of them interspersed with pleas for her to contact him. She read the tweets as if she were reading words written by a stranger, as if this were someone else’s husband. She wished she could feel something. But the jolt of finding out the truth about him had been like an electric current that short-circuited her ability to feel much of anything at all.
The only surge of emotion she was feeling these days was whenever she was around Michael. She thought about when she’d spotted his Jeep parked outside the bakery. She’d told herself it couldn’t be his, but deep inside she’d wanted it to be. And when she and Shea had walked by the McCoy house on the way back from their walk, she’d hoped he would be there. She bit her lip. In some ways it felt like that first summer when they’d become more than childish pals. How she’d lived for him to notice her, to tease her, to say something laced with meaning. That had been before her parents split, that one perfect summer she always went back to in her mind—when everything seemed filled with joy and she still believed that the kind of love she wanted was possible.
Of course, then she’d landed Michael and things started moving faster and faster until she hadn’t even known what she wanted. The one thing she had known was she didn’t want to end up like her mother, heartbroken and alone. So much for that life goal.
She kept reading the tweets until she got to the last one. It said, “Drove by the ski lifts. Remembered our nighttime ride.”
She smiled reflexively over that one. Almost as if she’d watched it in some romantic movie instead of lived it. Was it only five years ago she’d taken that ski trip alone?
She shut the laptop and looked around the room that was hers but not hers. She’d gone a long way only to end up back where she started. She cr
ossed the room and picked up an old framed photo of her and Michael, Shea and Owen, the four of them together. They were all wearing T-shirts and sunglasses, their faces tan, their smiles white and wide. They all looked so happy. She peered closer at the picture. “Were you happy?” she asked her younger self. “And if you were, why didn’t you know it?”
Eleven
The next morning Ivy was up and out early, dropping the bundle of envelopes at the post office before heading to the bakery to help Leah. She watched the man carry the bag away, sending the tags off to their destinations, hopefully to return bearing wishes for Shea and Owen. Wishes for the life—the marriage—Ivy herself had once wished for. It was all too ironic for words. But she didn’t dare deny her sister a chance at happiness just because she’d missed out. Making this wishing tree happen was one small way to say she was sorry for the mistakes of her past.
She caught herself looking for the yellow Jeep again as she pulled into the bakery parking lot, then shook her head at how silly she was being. She might as well get into a time machine and travel back to her teenage years for how she was acting. She grabbed the bag of assorted things Margot had thrust into her hands as she left, and headed inside to find Lester at the counter.
“Hi, Lester, good to see you again,” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah, you too.”
She held up the bag. “Leah back there? I’ve got some stuff for her from Margot.”
“How is Margot?” Lester asked.
“Um, fine?”
“That’s good, that’s good. Please tell her I said hello when you see her, if you would.”
“Um, sure. I will.” She headed into the kitchen, where she could hear the radio playing and Leah, as always, humming along softly.
“Why was Lester asking after Mom?” Ivy asked without preamble, dropping the bag on the work area Leah was using. She pointed at it. “That’s from Mom.”
“Good morning to you too, Ivy.” Leah made a face at her. “And if you must know, Lester is a nice person. Just because he asks after someone does not imply anything. Why? Are you trying to pair him off with your mother now? And move that bag out of my way, please.” She shooed the bag off the table, and Ivy, frowning, moved it over to a crowded countertop.
Ignoring her insinuations about Lester, Leah instructed her to roll out the dough for a batch of cinnamon rolls. Ivy was rusty at first, but the feel of the rolling pin working against the elastic dough came back to her quickly. Leah stopped long enough to watch and comment. “Good job. I knew you’d get back in the swing of things.”
Ivy wished that a few minutes working with dough was all she needed to get back in the swing of things. Instead she kept her attention focused on what she was doing, finding the physical activity good for stress relief. She could feel the tensions about Elliott start to ease, moving out of her body via her shoulder and arm muscles. She imagined the burning sensation she felt from the exertion was the stress, burning away. She listened to the radio along with Leah, and they worked in companionable silence for a time.
“So, I was wondering the other night about you and Elliott,” Leah said, interrupting Ivy’s reverie.
With her head down so Leah couldn’t see, Ivy closed her eyes for a brief moment and took a deep breath. “Oh? What about?”
“I couldn’t remember how you met him. I mean, I know it was on that ski trip you went on, but I was hoping you’d tell me the rest while we work.” Leah laughed. “Ain’t got nothing else to do.”
Inside Ivy was panicking. She used to love the story of how she and Elliott met, used to tell it to anyone who would listen. But now of all times? That was the last thing she wanted to talk about, and she certainly didn’t want Leah or anyone else to see the shame she carried over what Elliott had done. April wasn’t the only one with a broken picker.
She knew Leah was just trying to be nice, trying to take an interest when the rest of the family never had, maybe trying to shed some light on her romance since everyone was making a big deal over Shea’s. But her timing couldn’t have been worse. She exhaled and looked up to see Leah’s expectant face, watching her.
“It’ll make the time go faster, you’ll see,” Leah said, nodding.
“I’m sure it will,” Ivy responded. She thought about it for a moment, allowing the memory to come back full force instead of shooing it to the corners of her mind like she usually did. As her relationship with Elliott had started to deteriorate, she’d all but stopped thinking of their love story, focusing instead on fueling her anger. If she thought about what they’d had, she’d have to think about what she’d lost.
She glanced over at Leah, who had turned her attention back to the intricate lace pattern she was creating on a wedding cake that would go out later that week. White on white, it was quite possibly the most beautiful cake Ivy had ever seen.
“You’re right,” she began. “I did meet him on that ski trip.” She decided she would tell it like the story was about two other people, people she used to know a long time ago who had faded away over time.
She took a deep breath and began. “If you remember, Shea and I were supposed to go with Dad. But then he had to cancel because he had some business thing come up.”
“It’s always business with your father,” Leah observed.
“You’re right about that,” Ivy agreed, though she felt bad for her father, who had always worked so hard. She’d never understood that until she started working for him. “So when Dad cancelled, we thought the trip would get cancelled. But then Shea came up with this brilliant plan that we’d just go on our own. I was just out of college and she was in college, so we figured, why not just go together?” Sometimes she wondered if things would’ve turned out like they did if Shea had gone with her.
“And then Shea got sick.” Aunt Leah seemed to be reading her mind.
She rolled her eyes. “And then Shea got the chicken pox. Who gets chicken pox at twenty years old?” She could still see Shea, red-spotted and clawing at her skin like a madwoman, crying over missing the trip. Her mom had made her wear gloves so she didn’t scar her skin. But Ivy could still see that one little scar beside her nose, a reminder of the way things don’t turn out as planned.
“I bet you thought the trip was over for sure then,” Aunt Leah said.
“Of course. Who goes skiing alone? So I called Dad to tell him. And he said, ‘Now why would you let that stop you?’ And he proceeded to talk me into going on the trip alone.”
She thought for a moment about that day, how she’d called Michael and run the idea by him. He’d actually agreed with her dad. He’d said she should see it as a personal adventure. “It’ll be like climbing Everest. Only you won’t have to leave the state,” he’d joked. Funny how nearly everyone in her life at that time had been all for it. Except for Margot, of course. She’d thought it was risky for a young woman to travel alone and lectured Ivy about precautions all the way out to the car the day she left.
But she hadn’t warned her about what to do when a handsome stranger talked to her in the lodge restaurant.
“So you went.” Leah’s comment interrupted her reverie.
“Yeah, sorry.” She smiled ruefully. “I went. Drove by myself. Checked in by myself. Skied by myself. And I was proud of myself. But lonely. I was going to just get room service that first night, but I wanted to be around people. So I had dinner in the lodge, sitting by myself, naturally.”
Leah looked up from the cake, sensing what came next. She loved a good love story as much as the next person. “And you met Elliott.”
She nodded, unable to keep the smile from filling her face as she remembered seeing him that first time. “He was working there, helping set up their computer reservation system. He’d been there awhile at that point, gotten to know the employees. He was having his dinner at the bar, cutting up with the bartender. But he kept looking over at me.” She remembered how she’d tried to do things with her left hand, so he would see her engagement ring. Still, that hadn�
�t stopped him from coming over to her table when she finished eating. She hadn’t known if that made him a snake or just a determined suitor.
Leah snorted with laughter. “I’ve seen him. You’d have had to have been blind not to look back.”
She smiled. He was good-looking. But more than that. He had been unfamiliar. Intriguing. For the record, it would’ve never gone further if he hadn’t initiated things. But then he walked over, pulled out the chair opposite her, and said, “I believe this seat is taken.” And for some reason, it hadn’t seemed like a line. It had seemed like that seat was taken, had always been meant for him. And as they talked that night, she’d felt less and less like he was a stranger and more and more like he was someone she’d known forever.
They’d covered emotional ground in the course of that night that she hadn’t known was possible, Ivy telling him things she’d never told a soul. Later she would tell Shea that Michael knew her history, but Elliott knew her heart. Shea, angry by then, had scoffed at that, dismissed it as the silly ramblings of someone with a bad case of infatuation. But how else could she explain it to someone who didn’t understand what happened between them that night? It was like … magic, to quote Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle. She continued her story, breezing through the details of him approaching her in the restaurant. There were some things she didn’t want to get into with her aunt. There were some things that hurt so much to remember, she couldn’t speak them aloud. One of the things that disappointed her the most was the height from which they had fallen. For a time, they had flown.
The Wishing Tree Page 11